edTPA Results

Stanford University faculty and staff at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) developed edTPA. They received substantive advice and feedback from teachers and teacher educators and drew from experience gained from over 25 years of developing performance-based assessments of teaching (including the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) Standards portfolio, and the Performance Assessment for California Teachers.

The design and review teams have included hundreds of university faculty, national subject-matter organization representatives (e.g., NCTM, NCTE, NSTA, etc.), and K–12 teachers. Stanford University is the exclusive author and owner of edTPA.

edTPA is a performance-based, subject-specific assessment and support system used by teacher preparation programs throughout the United States to emphasize, measure and support the skills and knowledge that all teachers need from Day 1 in the classroom. For each handbook field, the placement is a Pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade classroom. edTPA is a subject-specific assessment that includes versions for 27 teaching fields. The assessment features a common architecture focused on three tasks: Planning, Instruction, and Assessment.

Aspiring teachers must prepare a portfolio of materials during their student teaching clinical experience. edTPA requires aspiring teachers to demonstrate readiness to teach through lesson plans designed to support their students' strengths and needs; engage real students in ambitious learning; analyze whether their students are learning, and adjust their instruction to become more effective. Teacher candidates submit unedited video recordings of themselves at work in a real classroom as part of a portfolio that is scored by highly trained educators. edTPA builds on decades of teacher performance assessment development and research regarding teaching skills and practices that improve student learning.

The University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) College of Education has been administering the edTPA since we piloted it in 2013 -2014. This is not a high-stakes test in Colorado since it is not required for licensure. It is, however, one of the only options for finding reliable and valid data about how teacher candidates are performing in the classroom. Our teacher candidates’ work is scored locally as well as nationally. We have altered our courses in response to edTPA scores in response to lower scores in teacher feedback and the use of academic language. Below are scores from the past two years.